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Jennifer Rubin posts on our “feckless” Cuba policy. Feckless gets tossed around a lot when thinking of this administration. The word is defined thus; weak, ineffective worthless, irresponsible. Fits perfectly.
… In a letter to the president today Rubio observed, “While I believe that the entirety of your new Cuba policy is overwhelmingly one-sided in the Castro regime’s favor and based on the flawed premise that giving it more legitimacy and money will result in a freer Cuban people, the least your Administration can do now is hold the regime accountable for fully freeing these 53 political prisoners as well as those who have been detained in recent weeks.” He urged the administration to “to cancel the travel of Administration officials to Cuba to further discuss the normalization of diplomatic relations at least until all 53 political prisoners, plus those arrested since your December 17th announcement, have been released and are no longer subjected to repression that often takes the form of house arrests, aggressive surveillance, denied Internet access, forced exile and other forms of harassment.”
With answers like the ones given by the State Department on Monday, I see no chance of any ambassador to Cuba being confirmed or any change in U.S. law getting through Congress. This is another instance of weakness and embarrassing lack of diplomatic prowess. Congress should do nothing to enable the administration’s folly.
Craig Pirrong posts on the continuing decline of commodity prices. He sees the cause as weak Chinese demand and notes that traders are trying to discern Chinese intent.
… Commodity traders want to know. But given the opacity of the Chinese decision making process, it’s impossible to know. The signals are very, very mixed. No doubt there is a raging debate going on within the leadership now, and between the center and the periphery, and decisions are zinging and zagging along with that debate.
I see three alternatives, two of which are commodity bearish. First, there is a transition to a more consumption-based model: this would lead to a decline in commodity demand. Second, there is a crash or hard landing as the credit boom implodes due to the underperformance of past investments: definitely bearish for commodities. Third, the Chinese keep pumping the credit, thereby keeping commodity demand alive. The third alternative only delays the inevitable choice between Options One and Two.
In brief, for the foreseeable future, the most important factor in commodity markets will be what goes on in Chinese policymaking circles. And insofar as that goes, your guess is as good as mine.
Mark Steyn is profiled and his new book is reviewed in Canada’s National Post.
… Political correctness is not unknown to Steyn but he apparently hopes it will go away. He’s not afraid to be flagrantly disrespectful, even to the poor and allegedly downtrodden, if the occasion demands it. A few hours after Margaret Thatcher’s death he noted that “the snarling deadbeats of the British underclass were gleefully rampaging through the streets” with a banner that announced “THE BITCH IS DEAD.” Today, Steyn acknowledges, the Thatcher era may look like a magnificent but temporary interlude in Britain’s dissolution, but that’s no reason to apply gentlemanly prose to those who hate the memory of a magnificent accomplishment.
He’s a tough and uncompromising critic of everybody from political leaders to folk singers. He thinks the invention of the “faux-folk song” helped infantilize American culture. The folk songs are “nursery-school jingles, which is why they’re so insidious.” In another mood Steyn includes a marvelous magazine piece, “MoonRiver and Me,” a subtle evocation of the power of popular song and the best appreciation of Johnny Mercer’s great lyrics that I’ve ever read.
When growing anti-Semitism in the Arab states is the subject (as it often is these days) Steyn expresses his sympathy through a sharp and utterly unsentimental example. He mentions that in the 1920s a Jew was finance minister of Egypt. That man’s descendants now live in France — not just because a Jew in Egypt can no longer be finance minister but because “a Jew in Egypt can no longer be.”
When people praise H.L. Mencken, they often say we need someone like him in our time. Steyn is far from an echo of Mencken —for one thing, he has none of the ugly prejudices. But he’s the only writer today who sometimes brings the best of Mencken to mind.
Andy Malcolm didn’t think much of Gohmert’s challenge to Boehner.
The 114th Congress opens today with Republicans in full control for the first time since George W. Bush was hated.
Obama and Harry Reid can’t face the trans-continental rejection of their policies and procedures by midterm voters. But with that resounding voter endorsement producing an historic House majority and a workable Senate one, the GOP has a golden chance to show its governing prowess in these 670 days until the presidential election.
So, what does a clownish, rump posse of disgruntled House conservatives do? It launches a very public, very hopeless bid to thwart the will of colleagues, who already voted, and oust John Boehner as speaker.
Ah, that’s just what the media loves to cover — old conservative white guys squabbling over political spoils before they do a lick of work, if that’s what members of Congress do for their $172K.
Now, Boehner is a pragmatic politician. He’s nowhere near as openly conservative and confrontational as some vocal ideological purists. He doesn’t grandstand with long-winded denunciations that get tribe members in war paint all excited while Americans silently think, “WTH?”
A lot of people are unhappy with Boehner’s un-rabid demeanor. When hyperbolic Boehner critics say there’s no difference between him and the Dems, refresh your mental screen with the image of Nancy Pelosi. She engineered ObamaCare’s passage without reading it. …
But, Kevin Williamson did.
… Will Rogers famously joked: “I don’t belong to any organized political party — I’m a Democrat,” and there has long been a great deal of self-congratulatory myth-making among Democrats about the freewheeling nature of their party and the array of independent minds that compose it. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth: Congressional Republicans are in fact more likely to buck their leadership, and to vote against the majority of their party, than are Democrats. The Republican party is mainly organized by ideology; the Democratic party is mainly organized by the bundling of special interests — the Teamsters and the people who demand federal subsidies for sex-change operations are not obvious policy allies, but the Democrats offer sops to both, so they work together.
The Republicans, and conservatives at large, are a fractious bunch because values play a more outsize role in Republican politics than in Democratic politics. Republican voters are jurors weighing the evidence and deciding whether Boehner et al. should be charged with the felony of being too soft. Democrats are horse-traders, and they’ll stomach Barack Obama’s stand against gay marriage if they think that they can get something (e.g., federalized health care) out of it — or if they think he’s insincere, which is generally a safe bet.
Louie Gohmert probably should not be the speaker of the House. But his unsuccessful run was nonetheless a good thing for the party — a much better thing that the brute-force display of the Republican leaders who leaned on representatives who might otherwise have cast a protest vote — or more than that — for Gohmert. Papering over philosophical and political differences through a show of official might by the Republican leadership will not make the disputes within the party go away — it will only cause them to fester.
Tuesday was an excellent day to have that fight. Wednesday, it is time for a different one.
Here’s some fun as Jonathan Tobin posts on the Harvard profs who are upset about the costs of affordable health care.
Liberal academics have always been among those who have been the most ardent supporters of ObamaCare. But the Harvard faculty is now discovering the joys of ObamaCare and, as the New York Times reports, are no more pleased with it than many other Americans. That this same group, many of whose members played prominent roles in promoting the passage of the Affordable Care Act, should now be experiencing its problems is cold comfort to fellow sufferers. But the outrage that Harvard professors are venting about being asked to pay more for fewer benefits is a delightful example of liberal hypocrisy at its worst.
The Harvard story is yet another example of the basic political problem with the ACA. Prior to its implementation, both its supporters and many of its critics believed that once in force it would become as popular as Social Security or Medicare and become politically untouchable. But that failed to take into account the fact that unlike those venerable government benefit programs that are viewed as harming no one (except, perhaps, the taxpayers of the future), ObamaCare is a scheme that creates winners and losers. …
… We may well mock liberals like the denizens of Harvard’s faculty lounges who blithely support huge changes that aimed at social transformation yet believed they could keep their own “Cadillac plans” without higher costs. But the problem here is that the entire nation was sold a bill of goods and is now being forced to swallow a bad deal in order to achieve gains that may not be commensurate with the pain that comes with them. That is why those who still blithely assume that the debate about this law is over are dead wrong.
Jim Taranto has fun too.
In one of his best-known aphorisms, the late William F. Buckley is reputed to have said that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people listed in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. Although Buckley was famously a Yale man, this is generally understood to have been an expression of antielitist sentiment rather than intraleague antipathy.
But the New York Times reports that the Harvard faculty is unhappy about being governed by the Harvard faculty. Its headline, “Harvard Ideas on Health Care Hit Home, Hard,” invokes with irony not Buckley but Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” (We used the quote in 2012, in a not-unrelated context.)
“The professors are in an uproar,” the Times tells us, because ideas hatched by “Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy” are now being “applied to the Harvard faculty” thanks to ObamaCare. …